


comfort

by finalizer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Evil Fools In Love, M/M, Soft Kylux, hux is devastated by the lack of a How To Feelings manual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-21 22:58:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12467860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finalizer/pseuds/finalizer
Summary: “I was — busy,” Ren says.“Sitting motionlessly?”“ — preoccupied, then.”“With what, pray tell?”“It’s quiet in your head.”In which Hux wants to work, Ren wants a break, and neither wants to admit what they mean to each other.





	comfort

**Author's Note:**

> these days i'm running solely on coffee and the looming, omnipresent thought of how much hux and kylo love each other

The door slides open with a damning hiss just as Hux furiously resets every set of calculations he’d spent the last two hours stumbling over. The harsh glow of the blue holoscreen casts a dangerous shadow over the angrily contorted lines of his face and Ren seems to freeze in the doorway for the slightest of moments, hardly detectable, before letting himself slip inside.

The mask is gone for once, and Hux doesn’t bother asking why — unless it was chucked across the command bridge with the intention of bodily harming one of his crew, he could honestly care less where the monstrosity had disappeared to. Ren certainly doesn't offer an explanation, let alone a civil greeting of any sort.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Hux bites out, trailing Ren with glassy eyes as he stalks across the room — quiet and ghostlike, like the predator he is — and gingerly sits at the edge of Hux’s bed. He’s almost too careful, like he’s been berated before, one too many times, about ruining the aesthetic value of a crisply ironed sheet. “You got my invitation?”

Ren blinks in childlike confusion.

Hux waits a moment before coating his voice in sugary sarcasm. “Right. There wasn’t one. Care to enlighten me as to what you’re doing here? I’m working, Ren.”

Ren retains eye contact, unflinching. He doesn’t bother with anything as timid as a bashful, apologetic half-smile, just keeps staring at Hux, blank and expressionless, while most men would cower and cast their eyes to the ground in shame at Hux’s cold tone alone.

It’s almost unsettling.

Acting on some inexplicable instinct, Hux asks before his brain can catch up with his throat. “Is something wrong?”

He regrets the words as soon as they come — it almost makes it seem like he _cares_.

Ren twitches, equally surprised at hearing concern from Hux, of all people. It snaps him out of his eerie haze, at least, sparing Hux a potential twenty minute staring contest with an unstable Sith-wannabe in the delicate confines of his quarters.

“Fine,” he says simply, quietly. 

Hux waits for an elaboration. He’s patient on the surface; hardly aware of the restlessness itching deep beneath his skin, dumbfounded at his sudden desire to hear what Ren has to say, to make sure he’s not fraying at the edges too badly.

It’s for the good of the Order, Hux tries to rationalize, to make sure Ren is emotionally balanced. Hissy fits lead to buzzing lightsabers, which lead to smoldering equipment, then terrified ‘troopers, spiraling morale, and so forth. It’s only logical to mend Ren before he snaps, or so Hux tells himself.

Ren is staring at Hux again, and Hux is overwhelmed with the uneasy suspicion that Ren had made himself privy to the thoughts clogging his already overworked mind. He has schematics to adjust, reports to evaluate; he’s running late on a hundred and one things, and while a distraction could prove useful, Ren is evidently not here for sex this time around.

“Can I — ” Ren says then, trails off, and starts over. “I’ll be quiet. Can I just — stay here?”

Hux’s very being screeches to a halt and it takes every ounce of his self control not to gape openly at Ren asking for explicit permission to do something. 

“Why?” he asks, fearful that prolonged silence will lead to more questionable thoughts for Ren to feast on.

Vaguely amused, Ren answers with a question of his own. “Am I that distracting?”

Hux scoffs, and turns his full attention back to the holoscreen above his desk. It’d stopped blinking minutes ago, as the full progress of his incorrect computations was wiped from the hard drive. Ren isn’t distracting, per se, and not nearly as much as he’d be with his clothes off. The lack of mask, however, isn’t ideal — it gives way to Ren’s too-dark eyes and the worryingly ashen circles beneath them.

There’s something off about him, more so than usual, an air of something chaotic and unsettled, electrifying the air between them and sending a bone-rattling shiver down Hux’s spine. 

_For the good of the Order, that’s all._

“Do as you wish, Ren. Unlikely you’d leave if I told you to.”

He doesn’t turn to Ren as he says it, instead dragging a pale, gloveless finger across the holo to open a new document. He’s exhausted in a way a good night’s sleep can’t help; not with the amount of caf in his system, coursing through his veins like wildfire, egging him to keep working when all his body wants to do is shut down.

The ‘trooper he’d sent for another cup no more than a half hour ago had gone missing in action, and Hux doesn’t put it past Phasma and her weird, protective tendencies to have intercepted the messenger and effectively cut off Hux’s supply before he drank himself towards a caffeine induced heart attack. She’s strange that way, caring about Hux as if they’re good friends.

He waits for Ren to acknowledge his decision, but Ren stays inhumanly silent. Hux swipes at the projection, steering his mind to focus on nothing but the duties at hand. He does his very best to zero in on the screen, to wipe everything else from his field of vision and every distraction from his mind, yet can’t help but listen for the slightest rustle of fabric, or the creak of the bed as Ren rearranges his position. The sounds don’t come. Hux runs another set of diagnostics, complete with the infinitesimally tweaked decimal points he’d entered. The algorithm glitches and Hux tries not to swear. He longs for the familiar squeak of leather as he tightens his bare fingers into a fist.

It repeats, over and over again, in an ungrateful game of trial and error. He edits the details, runs the numbers, and his eyes light up with the reflection of the blood red error box expanding over the screen. Again, and again. 

If this was anything else, he’d pass it on to the technicians, who perhaps have less expertise than himself, but infinitely more time on their hands without the looming concern of watching over every gear and cog on the ship — but Hux knows he doesn’t want anyone’s hands but his own tampering with such vital schematics, or minds duller than his poking around in matters they can’t appreciate the way he does.

Minutes pass, then an hour. Time runs together to envelop Hux in a repetitive trance: type, run test, _red_ , type, run test, _red_. He considers his empty mug, tired brain picking up on the wafting aroma of caf that’s not really there. His hands blur before his eyes as he backspaces a number and replaces it with another. His veins stand out, a cruel blue against the pallor of his skin, and he muses about how vulnerable it makes him look. Again, he misses his gloves.

The system lags for a second longer than he’s willing to wait, and in the midst of restraining himself from throwing everything across the room, desk included, he lets his thoughts drift to the fantasy of a reasonable sleep cycle, wherein he doesn’t need to rely on stim shots and synthesized supplements to stay upright on the bridge.

“It’s like an exhaust system,” a voice says, and Hux startles, nearly knocking himself off his chair in the process. As quiet as he was, Hux had forgotten Ren was right there, perched at the edge of the bed like a malevolent bird. Hux collects his bearings, striving to look less rattled than he feels, and turns to Ren with a mild expression of disdain.

He raises his eyebrows in question, conveying through tense silence his desire for a slightly less cryptic explanation. 

Ren flicks an equally ungloved finger towards the screen without removing his hand from his lap. “That — what you’re trying to stabilize. It’s like an exhaust system on a ship, isn't it?”

Hux glares at him. “In a way, yes.”

“In layman’s terms, of course,” Ren says, with an odd sort of smile. He’s humbling himself at the feet of Hux’s superior knowledge on the topic, though in a manner no less sarcastic than Hux would expect from him. “It would take a bit of do-over work, but you can maximize the heat transfer without overdoing the isolation or compromising conductivity if you change the core.”

Hux pauses, intrigued, then pretends not to be. “Easier said than done. Resources are pitifully limited, unless we reconsider dipping into stores of alarmingly toxic energy.”

Ren leans back, feet dangling off the edge of the bed for a moment before returning to the ground. He’s almost giddy — invested in a way he regrettably never seems to be in the day to day workings of the Order. 

“Then your problem would be reducing radioactivity, which is easier to swipe under the rug than a deathly unstable reactor; less casualties. Humor me,” he adds, when Hux looks unconvinced, and murderous at being upstaged. There’s a crack in the mask though, a sheen of curiosity that Ren wants to wrap his fingers around and pull, until Hux comes around and sees his way of things. He adds a personal touch, in an attempt to do just that: “Hux, come on. Put in the specifics for a different core and run a test. _Hux_.”

There’s a befuddled look about Hux that grows with each careful enunciation of his name on Ren’s lips. “Are you trying to bewitch me?”

“If I was, you’d be doing it already.”

Hux huffs, far past trying to understand the nonsensical way Ren’s mind works.

But he turns back to the projection regardless, the bright blues harsher than he remembers, as if the screen had gotten brighter in his minute long absence. There’s an aching throbbing in his temples, telling him to give his mind a break and return to pestering his pet project after a relatively good night’s sleep, or another illicitly acquired brew of too-strong caf.

He locates and opens a list of First Order sanctioned materials, watching it fill his screen with endless trails of numbers and letters; considers the alternatives Ren had suggested, and selects one of the more stable variants at random. Of course Ren advocates for something that could get them all killed. 

In a moment of rare indulgence, Hux gives Ren what he wants and enters the string of numbers. His hands fall into his lap, stilled, as the holo blinks green.

He stares at the screen for longer than necessary.

“ _Fuck_.”

Ren preens, and Hux pointedly doesn’t pay him any mind. It’s silent for another moment as Hux lets his tired eyes slip over the results of the diagnostic, every piece of the puzzle slotting into place. It was clever: trace toxicity levels could be concealed easily enough, and manipulated into obedience with the right amounts of technology and wit. If all else failed, Hux wasn’t above sending one or two less relevant engineers to manually tamper with the system if the radiation took a violent turn. Still, he’d rather chew through his own arm then admit to owing the breakthrough to the ship’s resident monster.

“I told you so,” Ren says then, suggestive. He means to assert his dominance on the playing field while also making damn sure Hux is aware, loud and clear, that he’d made himself comfortable in a warm corner of Hux’s mind, sifting through his thoughts right as they flickered by.

Hux lets his eyes drop from the projection for the first time since the alert box turned green.

Ren is looking at him with a smile caught somewhere between smug and wary, like he expects praise but doesn’t want to look too eager for it. He fails spectacularly, gazing at Hux like he’s waiting to be given a medal; like a puppy wagging its tail in hopes of a bone to gnaw on.

“I suppose you can be useful when you put your mind to it,” Hux tells him, and it’s the closest to a thank you he allows himself. For the sake of squashing the hot feeling in his chest, he adds a fine coat of derision. “You could have brought it up earlier — an hour or so of valuable time could have been spared.”

“I was — busy,” Ren says.

“Sitting motionlessly?”

“ — preoccupied, then.”

“With what, pray tell?”

“It’s quiet in your head,” Ren tells him, with a raw sort of honesty, and Hux freezes. “Orderly. It’s not quite calm, but it’s a controlled sort of anger. Calculated chaos. And the repetition — the numbers, the codes, the way it flows through your mind is almost graceful; all too simple, relaxing. I don’t know how to explain.”

“Meaning?” Hux demands, foregoing the key issue of Ren _nesting_ _inside his skull_.

Ren shrugs, limp and one-shouldered. “You’re smart. Or clever, I don’t know. Unlike the rest. Your mind runs like a computer.”

The bubbling nausea, because that’s what it is, licks at Hux’s insides, strains the confines of his chest, and he’s glad Phasma cut him off before his nervous system overloaded on caffeine and stimulants. Because that’s all it is. That’s why his hands are jittery in his lap, and why his body feels too small.

“So you came to leech off my peace and quiet? Is there anything else I should know? Were you in a particularly foul mood? Should I expect a complaint from maintenance regarding damaged training equipment? Were the punching bags and practice droids not enough to soothe your temper?”

Ren doesn’t look insulted. Instead, he says. “I like the way you work. Function,” he corrects himself, then once again, because Hux isn’t a damn droid with mechanically instilled mannerisms, “ _think_.”

It’s likely the strangest compliment Hux has received in his life, not that he’s used to showers of praise outside of a strictly workplace environment.

“Right,” he replies, as eloquently as he can.

They both fade into silence, both eager to speak, to say something, anything, but the right words fail to come. 

Something creaks, an ominous and distant grinding of the massive gears below deck. Hux ignores it — the crew will no doubt reach out to him if it’s important enough to warrant his attention and personal presence. It’s almost laughable, though, the symbolism: a lull in conversation, a distressingly uncomfortable silence, and then a jarring noise to signal the growing abyss between them.

Hux drops his gaze first, unable to handle the open, absurdly, _intoxicatingly_ inviting way Ren’s eyes meet his. There’s a beat, a glimmer of a hilariously unreasonable notion, as Hux rakes his gaze over the flooring, that perhaps the suffocating pressure pushing against his ribs has nothing to do with his less than ideal, unhealthy even, lifestyle. 

Of course it’s unhealthy — Ren’s sitting right there, two paces away, and Hux hasn’t kicked him out yet for reasons he can’t explain. Whatever’s happening to him, the vicious pull in his chest, he’s at least partially responsible for it himself.

“Can I kiss you, Hux?”

The question doesn’t surprise Hux as much as the realization that he’d been expecting it all along. He’s never been much of an advocate for love, or devotion, but in that moment, he can’t bring himself to say no.

Ren takes his silence as confirmation and takes a single, long step forward, dropping to his knees before Hux in a bewildering display of something akin to reverence. He’s quiet as he goes, soundless as always, and Hux’s palms rise to cup Ren’s jaw with so much tenderness it terrifies him. 

He meets Ren halfway, drawing him closer with his fingernails dragging across Ren’s skin, and kisses him like it’s not about lust, unhurried and measured, like it’s a craving that has nothing to do with attraction. And Ren opens up to him, fully surrendering, like Hux is a drug he can’t and doesn’t _want_ to shake.

Hux’s eyes are wide when they part; he’s afraid. The overwhelming ache in his chest subsides, contorts and molds itself into a single sharp point, slipping between his ribs and tearing through his heart.

“Don’t,” he says, hisses, through clenched teeth, when Ren takes a breath to speak.

Hux doesn’t think he could handle hearing those words from anyone. He thinks he would die if he heard them from Ren.

Ren nods, like he understands, but his eyes dim like he doesn’t. He shuffles backwards, too big and too clumsy, and Hux lets him, his fingers slipping free from their fragile hold on Ren’s cheeks.

Everything goes back to normal — the furious lights stop dancing in the corners of Hux’s vision, Ren returns to his perch at the edge of the bed. Everything is balanced again, but precariously now, like the slightest shudder could set them toppling over the edge.

Hux has a reputation — calm, orderly. He can’t double over in confused agony and scream at the walls like a child, like _Ren_ , when he’s lost and doesn’t know what to do next.

The screen is an agonizing blue when he turns back to it. He numbly reads through the numbers, uncomprehending. _Heat signature: stable; Toxicity: high_. He stares blankly at the warning. It’s the least of his problems, really.

It’s not until Ren leaves, an indeterminate amount of time later, unfolding himself from the bed without a goodbye, that Hux moves. Rash and instinctive, pushing his chair back with enough force to knock it to the ground, he flicks the damn holo off and swings; he stops himself moments before his fist connects with the steel of the nearest wall. He’d be useless for days with shattered fingers. He breathes in, and breathes out.

It hurts, how wrong he was. Hux stares at the door like Ren is somehow waiting on the other side; like he’s waiting for Hux to change his mind and beckon him right back inside with tears running down his cheeks and watery confessions on his lips.

If Ren is to be his undoing — 

Something inside him boils to a crescendo, and he swears he can hear the steam within him whistling, _screaming_ , to escape. Realization strikes like lightning and Hux crumbles.

— so be it.

Hux knows, innately, there’s nothing he wants more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to finish on a lighter note but i was listening to starkiller.mp3 which always puts me in a melancholic mood.. the ending wrote itself [shrug]
> 
> if u spot any mistakes, _bwease_ point them out, i was tragically too lazy too proofread 
> 
> yell at me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/finaiizer) & [tumblr](http://finaiizer.tumblr.com)


End file.
